Re: The Perseid shower - Anyone staying up for it?

Shutter speed is down to your focal length, I tend to stick to 15s at 50mm as above that I seem to notice things beginning to move. You can increase that time if you're wider, decrease if you're longer.

Aperture as wide as you can get it (e.g. not all lenses are capable or limited to f/1.8).

ISO as fast as your can get-away with, which depends entirely on the particular sensor you have, it's worth doing some experimentation or investigation on what sensor you have. Some modern ones are pretty great at read-noise.

You can further improve read noise by enabling long exposure noise reduction in your camera. This takes an exposure of equal length but with the shutter closed. The read-noise generated can be subtracted from the source image and used to cancel out a lot of it. But when taking lots of photos this can get annoying. Instead you can do this by hand by taking a few "dark" shots throughout the evening before your camera's sensor has cooled down and then do the extraction in Photoshop, or Dark Skies Stacker.

But by far the biggest issue you'll have this evening is the weather forecast. I'm not going to stay/get up for them this year because despite living in the country I've never had an especially successful evening on a clear night. Trying to catch a glimpse through clouds is not worth it.

Re: The Perseid shower - Anyone staying up for it?

Obviously getting away from light is a good idea and making sure there is nothing else in frame that can reflect artificial light back into your lens. Use your lens hood, it's designed to shade your lens from the harsh sunlight, but the same applies to other light sources on a dark night.